Churchill HS Parent Blog

This blog's purpose is to support and inform Churchill families and LD students navigating the college process and transitioning to life after high school. Churchill School is not responsible for the content of this blog. Please submit your email below for updates.

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Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Spirits were high at the Churchill Senior Breakfast yesterday as parents, students and Churchill staff mingled in the school auditorium. The ordeal of figuring out how to transition to life after Churchill is now behind us. At least the first step of the journey. Most students will attend college in the fall and a few are taking a gap year.

My son will attend Hofstra University on Long Island. His route there meandered from wanting to study hospitality at a small college in Florida to business management at a medium sized university with many academic options and solid LD support. Other students will attend Adelphi University, American University, Boston College, Connecticut College, Ithaca College, Skidmore College, SUNY New Paltz, Syracuse University and other great schools. A gap year student will attend University of Madrid, Spain.

Churchill families are savvy. "We're still waiting for financial packages," some parents would respond when asked where their son or daughter would attend. As readers of this blog know, I think that how to pay for college should be a main decision factor - families should think hard about the consequences of racking up debt to pay for education.

Having completed the college search with my son, I am now ready to hand over this blog to another Churchill parent, yet to be 'appointed'. Let me or Ms. Hugger know if you are interested.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Emilie did ED at Connecticut College - the only school on her list

In
October of her senior year, Emilie Stoll applied Early Decision (ED) to
Connecticut College (Conn) and became the first Churchill student ever
accepted, On December 15 she knew she would be attending her first and only choice, she said in a recent interview.

Emilie
first heard about Connecticut College in her junior year at Churchill
when she ran into an old dance buddy at the 28 Street subway stop. It
turned out that her friend was a freshman at Conn and raved about its
dance program and the college in general. Inspired by the conversation,
Emilie started researching Conn and discovered a small test-optional
liberal arts school that would allow her to combine her love of dance
with a strong academic education. After touring the campus twice, doing a
lot of leg work including learning about LD support, she decided to
apply ED.

The Churchill guidance office offered solid support
throughout the process. "Ms.
Hugger and Ms. McEntee were great," Emilie says. "They always had such enthusiasm for
anything I had to share with them about the school,” she adds.Taking advantage of the option, Emilie did not send any test scores. She did not want to
dedicate too much time to test prep and basically just showed up to take
the ACT, on which she says she scored OK.

Once she had decided to apply to Conn, Emilie saw no reason to visit other
schools. “I wanted to avoid becoming overwhelmed,” she says.

Emilie in her Conn dorm room.

After
she was accepted, Emilie traveled to New London, CT a third time to
familiarize herself with more practical Conn aspects including living
options. She requested a room at the North Campus, which she preferred
due to its proximity to the main dining hall and recent renovations. She
and a room-mate share a spacious room with great natural light and
cross ventilation.

The
academic transition has been smoother than expected and much is due to
Churchill teaching and instilling self-advocacy: “This is such a big
one," Emilie says. In addition to asking her professors for assistance
when necessary, Emilie takes advantage of French tutoring once a week
and considers utilizing the Writing Center.

Emilie
plans to major in Dance and English or Dance and Human Development
during her time at Conn, and study French in Paris in her junior year.Even
though she has now firmly launched into the college phase of her life,
Emilie misses Churchill and still keeps in touch with her school friends
and teachers. She plans to attend Alumni Night in January and share her
Conn experiences.

About
Early Decision (ED): Several colleges offer ED, which is a binding
commitment. Students who have been accepted ED have to withdraw all
applications to other schools. The advantage with ED is that a larger
proportion of the applicants tend to become accepted. Most colleges list
data that makes it easy to figure out ED odds. A similar option is
Early Action, which is non-binding and gives a piece of mind along the
college process to those who are not yet ready to commit to ED.

Monday, April 22, 2013

By Paul Sullivan (published in The New York Times 4.19.13)
Having a choice is generally a good thing, and being able to choose
among several college acceptances should be a wonderful thing indeed.

But let’s face it: the cost of a college education these days ranges
from expensive to obscenely expensive. So the decision is likely to be
tougher and more emotional than most parents and children imagined as
they weigh offers from colleges that have given real financial aid
against others that are offering just loans.

While some students will be able to go to college only if they receive
financial aid and others have the resources to go wherever they want,
most fall into a middle group that has to answer this question: Do they
try to pay for a college that gave them little financial aid, even if it
requires borrowing money or using up their savings, because it is
perceived to be better, or do they opt for a less prestigious college
that offered a merit scholarship and would require little, if any
borrowing? It’s not an easy decision.

“It’s not just the sticker price and the net costs,” said Sarah Turner,
professor of economics and education at the University of Virginia. She
added, “How likely is it that you will get into medical school or law
school or have some other opportunities” if you choose the more
prestigious college?

That’s the rational argument. In these decisions, though, emotion often
wins out, and it can lead to the slippery slope of excessive borrowing.

“Families really need to look realistically at what they can afford,”
said Lynn O’Shaughnessy, author of “The College Solution” and a blog
of the same name. “Sometimes, they’ll look at a package and say, ‘It’s
not enough, but we can sacrifice and send our children to the school
they really want to go to.’ They have to realize this a four- to
five-year commitment.”

Ms. O’Shaughnessy said she was trying to counsel a father in New Jersey
who was on the verge of making a horrendous financial decision. His
daughter had received a full scholarship to attend Rutgers University
but her first choice was New York University, which, even with financial
aid, would cost the family $32,000 a year. The father, an engineer who
was also out of work, said he was going to send her to N.Y.U.

But, unfortunately, that father is not so unusual. While it is hard not
to give our children what they want, here are some ideas on how to think
about this financial dilemma without going broke — or at least know why
you will be broke.

The competition to get into top colleges is fierce in many cities and
towns in America, but nowhere is it more so that at the country’s elite
institutions. And many parents feel compelled to reward all that hard
work.

The debate between paying full tuition at an elite institution or
accepting a merit scholarship from someplace less prestigious “is a
conversation we have all the time,” said James Conroy, chairman of
post-high-school counseling at New Trier Township High School in
Winnetka, Ill., an affluent suburb in Chicago. “It’s a tough
conversation because what it gets down to is the values of the family.”

But he said many parents did not realize that their children were going
up against other children who were identical to them — at least on
paper. “There are 100 schools that we talk about in this office day
after day after day,” he said. “But those are the same schools that
every New Trier across the country talks about.”

Prestige has always been part of the equation, but he said he had
expected parents to start looking for value in colleges after the 2008
financial collapse. Instead, parents have come to see the elite
universities as the only way to give their children a chance at success.
They feel jobs are hard to come by and companies are only going to look
to hire at the elite universities.

“Whether it’s true or not, I have no evidence,” he said. “But that was
what was out on the bongo drums in the community.”

Ms. O’Shaughnessy knows this thinking well. The New Jersey father she
described has many contemporaries willing to try to pay for something
they could not afford. And there’s no guarantee, she said, that N.Y.U.
will bring his daughter greater success.

“Frankly, I think that’s why East Coast schools that aren’t in the top
tier but are in cities can get away with charging outrageous amounts of
money and giving mediocre financial aid packages,” Ms. O’Shaughnessy
said. “Students fall in love with these schools, and there are parents
who are willing to sacrifice beyond all rational reasoning.”

But economists are not sure this trade-off is worth it. In two much-discussedstudies
about the value of a degree from an elite college — one with people who
graduated in the 1970s and the other with more recent graduates — Alan
B. Krueger, then an economist at Princeton University, and Stacy Berg
Dale, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, found that
equally smart students had about the same earnings whether or not they
went to top-tier colleges. The big difference, their studies found, came
from minority and low-income students who went to top-tier colleges:
They did better later on.

Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University, said he
could envision circumstances where there might be a benefit to attending
the more elite institution, but he could see more instances when paying
to go to a large, nonelite university was a waste of money.

“The difference between going to Swarthmore and Penn State is greater
today than it was in 1976 because there are higher returns to all
upper-end skills and connections,” he said. By contrast, a larger,
private, expensive nonelite university was not necessarily better than
“the flagship campus of a top-notch state university.”

For parents willing to pay more for that nonelite, private university,
Professor Katz said they should not think about it as an investment but
as a form of consumption. “If your kid is dead set on it, you can
splurge on it,” he said. “But you should view it like a wedding or a
vacation. There are plenty of things that you can do that make your life
better if you’re upper middle class, and that’s fine.”

This spending becomes problematic, of course, when parents cannot really
afford to pay and, worse, Professor Turner said, when students borrow
heavily without thinking about the kind of life they want after
graduation.

“Am I certain I’m going to end up on Wall Street?” she said. “If you
know that’s what you want to do, borrow and go to N.Y.U. But borrowing
does not make a lot of sense if you want to go to culinary school.”

In most cases, though, the decision is what Professor Turner called, “a
choice under uncertainty”: few high school seniors really know what they
want to do and, by extension, what they will earn.

Parents and their children trying to make the decision now need to be honest with themselves, Ms. O’Shaughnessy said. If they decide to pay more than they can afford for the coming school
year, they need to remember that they’re looking at a four-year expense
and that given increasing tuition, the total cost will be more than four
times the cost of freshman year. “If you have a smart student who can
get into some of these expensive schools, they’ll do well in other
places,” she said.

Parents and students also need to look at the graduation rates of the
colleges they’re considering. While taking on a lot of debt is not good,
taking on a lot of debt and not graduating from college is even worse.

And if the students received any merit scholarships, they should
consider them. They are a sign that a college really wants the student.

For parents who will be in this situation in a few years, you could do
worse than take a page from the playbook of James Montague, director of
guidance and support services at Boston Latin School, the oldest public
school in the United States and one that selects students based on exams
and grades. Mr. Montague said his students, a third of whom are on subsidized lunch
programs, do not often have the options of their peers at wealthy
suburban schools. Their parents are not going to be able to find or
borrow $30,000 a year for four years.

To prevent disappointment — or to force the students who want to be
bakers to go to work on Wall Street to pay back their loans — he said he
encouraged students to apply to at least one state college that would
give them merit aid and to stick to the federally subsidized loan
limits.

“Our students are reasonable about this,” he said, adding, “Our students
are very resilient. They’re going to make it work.”

And ultimately, that will be what determines success long after a college is chosen.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

This is an excerpt from a New York Times blog Q & A with Brian Lindeman, the director of financial aid at Macalester College in St. Paul:
Families should know at least four things when they compare financial aid offers:

How much will I need to pay to the college (how much is my bill)?

What other costs do I need to be prepared for (textbooks, travel to and from campus, personal expenses, other fees)?

How much will I need to repay after college? What will be the
required monthly payment and how long will it take to repay my loans?

Are there factors that might cause my financial aid to change after
the first year? (Issues that can sometimes cause year-to-year
fluctuation include grade point average requirements for renewal of
scholarships, family members who graduate or enter college, or
significant changes in family income.)

There is a lot of information in a financial aid package so at Macalester we offer this video tour to our families.Q: How does a student improve his or her chances of getting financial aid that doesn’t need to be repaid?

Don’t be shy or embarrassed to let the college know about unusual
circumstances that may affect the family’s ability to pay for college.
Unusually high medical expenses or a recent job loss are examples. My
recommendation is that you write a short letter describing those
circumstances before you receive a financial aid result. If you then
receive a financial aid package that doesn’t seem to fit your
circumstances, follow up with the school’s financial aid office to ask
how they took your special circumstance into account.

Please note that there is no rainbow you can follow to a pot of gold.
You don’t need to visit campus and meet with the “right person” or make
sure that the financial aid officer is impressed by the student’s
wonderfulness. (If there is money for wonderfulness, it will be
distributed during the admission process in the form of a merit-based
scholarship.)

Q. How final is an institution’s financial aid offer? Is it etched in stone? Penciled in? Drawn in sand?

A. Most financial aid offices will not respond positively to simple
requests for more aid. We generally won’t improve financial aid packages
in response to a financial aid offer from another school. In my office,
our goal is to provide a financial aid package that makes Macalester
financially feasible. We know that the student will almost always have a
lower-cost option.

Over the years, I have had hundreds of conversations with parents
that start with, “My daughter loves Macalester, but we are really
struggling to figure out a way to make it work financially.” The next
step is a conversation about the content of the financial aid
application. We sometimes uncover factors that were either
misinterpreted initially or weren’t reported. Sometimes we can provide
more aid.
Families who are wondering whether to ask questions about financial
aid should know: You will not be the first or the last to do so. A
parent of a student who asks for more aid needs to be ready to hear
“no,” but there’s no reward for silence.

Q. What’s the worst thing a student could do when comparing financial aid offers?

A. I think the most common mistake I’ve seen is the failure to
understand cost and value in the long term. Too often, I talk to parents
who are choosing between schools based solely on the first year’s cost.

Students and parents should be thinking about the total cost for
degree completion. How many years will it take to graduate? What will
student and parent debt load be at graduation? How might sibling
enrollment affect financial aid availability in the future? Are there
other factors that might affect the availability of financial aid in
future years?
Similarly, families should be considering each institution’s value as
a multidecade return on investment. For traditional-age students, the
college years can be a crucible of intellectual and social development
that shapes a person’s life far beyond the first job after college. That
doesn’t mean that parents and students should sacrifice everything else
to choose the “perfect” school but it can sometimes mean that it’s a
good idea to stretch for the right fit.
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/how-final-is-a-colleges-financial-aid-offer/?src=recg

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

It’s not even April and many Churchill seniors have
already been accepted to college. I recently spoke with the mother of one of
those seniors, who does not want her or her child’s name in this article due to
privacy concerns. Her joy about her child’s acceptances is mixed with financial
fears.

To optimize financial and academic odds, the
senior applied to 15 colleges, some testing optional and other requiring
SAT/ACT scores. After receiving acceptance letters from several top colleges
with the right academic support, however, the family is concerned that a top
college could be financially out of reach, even after factoring in merit aid
and low cost student loans.

The family has experienced that the more
competitive the college is, the less free funding its financial aid package
will contain. While the student’s first choice did not offer any merit aid, other
colleges are tempting with up to $35,000 of free funding based on academic
accomplishments and other factors represented in the student’s applications.

The preference is to minimize costly loans and rely on merit aid, which requires the student to maintain a
certain grade point average, but doesn’t need to be paid back. News stories
about debt-laden college graduates who toil at unpaid internships or low wages
are common and scary. “College can become a debt sentence,” says private
finance adviser Suze Orman, who tells parents to entirely avoid private student
loans.

Today, a private undergraduate degree can cost
around $250,000 while a SUNY/CUNY degree is within reach for a fraction of that
price. A private college, however, may offer merit aid that can make the price
variation less dramatic. Applying early for financial aid can pay off because there
is a first come/first serve aspect. The family submitted the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and CSS profile as soon as applications were
accepted (January 2013). In addition, the student applied early action to
several schools, which was a confidence booster.

Working with Churchill’s college guidance office, the
family has also done a tremendous amount of independent research, which the mother
thinks is typical for the Churchill parent body.

“Churchill parents are savvy, otherwise we would
not have children at Churchill,” she says.

Monday, January 7, 2013

There are many programs that prepare high school teens for
transitioning to semi-adult life. Several colleges offer summer classes of
varying degree of academic rigor. Some of these programs award college credits
while other mainly focus on giving students a taste of independent life away
from home and how to function in a college setting.

While many of the private colleges' summer programs are expensive, City University of New York (CUNY) offers a tuition free six
week summer college program. Click here to read interview with a Churchill
student who attended College Now. Not all colleges accept credits from College
Now, but if you are considering a CUNY school you will be able to
accumulate college credits in advance during a College Now summer. College Now
is free for Churchill students and NYC public school students.

Other teen programs focus on community service, language
immersion and exposure to other cultures.

A limited list – feel free to contribute:

Ithaca College offers one week or three week summer college classes to prepare high school students for college.

Curry College and Landmark College are top LD colleges that offer college programs for high school students during summer.

NOLS:
A parent brought up this college credit leadership program at a recent Parent
Breakfast. Expensive, but scholarships are available.

Wingspan is a tuition free summer acting program.
A Churchill student who attended enjoyed it very much. No college credits
offered.

Visions Service Adventure
offers international community service programs during the summer for teens of
various ages. The cornerstones of the programs are meaningful service, cultural
immersion, adventure and community building.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Several companies that offer SAT and ACT prep classes also offer free mock ACT and SAT tests. If you decide to do a mock test, make sure to apply for extended time. One of the companies that offer mock tests is Bespoke. Some current 11th grade students have taken tests at one of Bespoke's locations and given positive feedback. Visit Bespoke's website to view multiple test sites and times: